This movie, like Ana Kokkinos' ``Head On'' a few years ago, shows that cultural difference in modern Australia is not just a matter of the Anglos and the Aborigines, but also the Anglos and the immigrant-descended European communities.
The ``spagnola'' is Lola, a beautiful Spanish woman (Lola Marcelli), a tribute reverently conferred on her by Italian neighbors and in-laws, living in a 1960s Australian town.
PHOTO COURTESY SPOT
Deserted by her husband for a blonde Australian woman, Lola is forced to look after her teenage daughter Lucia, (Alice Ansara) without the family savings he has waltzed off with.
PHOTO COURTESY SPOT
This is a portrait of loneliness and sexual longing, mixed with hatred and desperation. All the darkly thwarted sensuality, expressed as it is often through food, puts you in mind a little of movies like ``Delicatessen'' and ``Jamon Jamon.''
Alex Dimitriades, who played the gay Greek-Australian guy in ``Head On,'' here plays Lola's lover Stefano, who is baffled by her seething, continuous anger. Written and produced by Anna Maria Monticelli, this is a diverting, original piece of work.
PHOTO COURTESY SPOT
Scripted by actor-turned-writer Monticelli, ``La Spagnola'' draws upon its author's own experiences as a child of immigrant parents in 1960s Australia. Her film's Latin flavor, however, is as much literary and cinematic as personal.
PHOTO COURTESY SPOT
The rumbustious humor, gleefully mixing sex, scatology and food, resembles Fellini at his most burlesque, while the hints of the surreal and the supernatural recall South American magic realism. Marceli's operatic performance as the self-dramatizing Lola suits these moods perfectly, but it is Ansara's quieter, more restrained performance that provides the film's truest moments.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your